Laboratoire Agit’Art

Laboratoire Agit'Art was a revolutionary and subversive art collective founded in Dakar, Senegal, in 1974 that sought to combine traditional African performance and creativity with a contemporary aesthetic. The group emerged as a reaction against official, state-sanctioned cultural policy, in particular the aesthetics of Negritude championed by Senegal's first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor. The members of the collective, among them the artist and writer Issa Samb (also known as Joe Ouakam), El Hadji Sy and others, rejected an orientation towards museum-bound, commodified art and emphasised process, performance, improvisation and the ephemerality of the creative act. Their practices combined theatre, poetry, painting, sculpture from found materials, installation and street actions, often unfolding in a shared courtyard studio in central Dakar that itself became a living, constantly changing work. Laboratoire Agit'Art became one of the most influential centres of avant-garde and conceptual art in West Africa and an important example of the critical, anti-institutional art of the postcolonial era, one that rethought the very nature of African modernity.